John Glenn: Astronaut ace

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February 21, 2012


John Glenn fever gripped Cape Canaveral last week, just as it did half a century ago when America was on the verge of launching its first man into orbit.

Hundreds of NASA workers jammed a space center auditorium, three days before the 50th anniversary of Glenn’s historic flight, to see and hear the first American to circle the Earth. Then journalists got a crack at Glenn, ever patient at describing his momentous flight aboard Friendship 7 and the decades since.

The 90-year-old Glenn was joined at both events by Scott Carpenter, 86, the only other survivor of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, as the weekend of anniversary festivities began.

Glenn said he recollects the flight so often it seems like it took place just a couple weeks ago. He and Carpenter visited their old launch pad, Complex 14; it was from the blockhouse there that Carpenter called out “Godspeed John Glenn” before the rocket ignited.

The national attention then was “almost unbelievable,” Glenn said, adding that he and his colleagues learned to live with the acclaim “or tried to anyway.”

Former U.S. Sen. John Glenn talks, via satellite, with the astronauts on the International Space Station, before the start of a roundtable discussion titled "Learning from the Past to Innovate for the Future" Monday, Feb. 20, 2012, in Columbus, Ohio. Glenn was the first American to orbit Earth, piloting Friendship 7 around it three times in 1962, and also became the oldest person in space, at age 77, by orbiting Earth with six astronauts aboard shuttle Discovery in 1998. (AP Photo/Jay LaPrete)

Magical time: The early 1960s were a magical time in Cape Canaveral and adjoining Cocoa Beach, Carpenter said. “Everyone was behind us. The whole nation was behind what we were doing,” he said.

Glenn’s Friendship 7 capsule circled Earth three times on Feb. 20, 1962. Carpenter followed aboard Aurora 7 on May 24, 1962.

Not the first: They were the third and fourth Americans to rocket into space. Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom flew short suborbital missions in 1961, the same year the Soviet Union launched two cosmonauts into orbit on separate shots.

The Cold War was raging, and America was desperate to even the score. Glenn could have died trying if the heat shield on his capsule was loose as flight controllers feared. But the protective shield was tight, and Glenn splashed down safely.

Return to space: Glenn, a U.S. senator for Ohio for 24 years, returned to orbit aboard shuttle Discovery in 1998, becoming the world’s oldest spaceman at age 77 and cementing his super-galactic status.

“Flying in space at age 77, you’ve given me hope. I’ve got a few good years left, and I’m ready,” Kennedy Space Center director Robert Cabana, a former shuttle commander, told Glenn. Another retired shuttle commander, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden Jr., shared how the Mercury astronauts “really lit up the world for me in terms of probability or possibility of things that we could do.”

Glenn recalled how the Mercury astronauts traveled during their training to Cape Canaveral to watch a missile blast off. It was a night launch, and the rocket blew apart over their heads.

“That wasn’t a very good confidence-builder for our first trip to the cape,” Glenn said. Improvements were made, and Glenn said he gained confidence in his Mercury-Atlas rocket, a converted nuclear missile. Otherwise, he said he would not have climbed aboard.

No launch:Glenn and his wife, Annie, for the attempted liftoff of the newest of the Atlas rockets, an unmanned booster that NASA contractors hope one day will carry astronauts. Windy weather forced a scrub of the Navy satellite launch.

Astronaut John Glenn climbs into the Friendship 7 space capsule atop an Atlas rocket at Cape Canaveral, Fla. for the flight which made him the first American to orbit the earth in 1962. (AP Photo/NASA)

“Scrub! Welcome to the space program,” Glenn said at the news conference held in the old Mercury Mission Control, now located at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. “Not anything brand new to me.” Lousy weather spoiled Friday night’s launch attempt as well.

It took 11 tries for Glenn to get off the pad in 1962. He boarded three times before finally taking off, which he believes created even more of a public frenzy over his flight.

Reunion: On Saturday, Glenn and Carpenter will reunite with more than 100 retirees who worked on Project Mercury. And on Monday, the actual anniversary, Glenn will be feted at Ohio State University; its school of public affairs bears his name.

Glenn said he’s uncertain how he’ll mark the exact time of liftoff — 9:47 a.m. — come Monday. He admitted sometimes forgetting to mark the precise moment in the past. But not for this golden one, “for sure.”

What’s next? Besides reminiscing Friday, Glenn and Carpenter spoke of the future of space travel. When asked by Cabana “given where we’ve come, where are we going,” Carpenter had a one-word response. “Mars.” The crowd applauded.

Glenn had more to offer, stressing the importance of exploration as well as scientific research. He criticized the previous administration for promoting lunar bases and Mars travel, but providing no funds, and for canceling the space shuttle program. “A big mistake,” he said.

Glenn noted how NASA is relying on the Russians to transport American astronauts to and from the International Space Station, now that the shuttles are retired. That will continue until private U.S. companies have spacecraft ready to fly crews, an estimated five years away.

“What a big change that is from the days when there were the depths of the Cold War … fueling a lot of the interest in the space program,” he said.

Carpenter said he deplores the fact that America seems to have lost its resolve to press ahead in space exploration, as evidenced by NASA’s small share of the federal budget.

“I really miss my citizenship that was once in a can-do nation,” he said.

Another change in five decades: Glenn pointed out how cellphones have “more computing capacity than anything back at the time when we were flying in ’62.” Society has become so accustomed to new things, he said, that it will be difficult for NASA to generate the kind of excitement that Project Mercury or Apollo’s moonwalks did.

Repeatedly Friday, Glenn and Carpenter paid tribute to their five deceased Mercury colleagues: Shepard, Grissom, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper and Deke Slayton.

“We need five more chairs here,” Glenn told the NASA crowd.

The two pioneers received standing ovations.

Here’s a look at Glenn’s launch: http://youtu.be/8T0i0YkxGOU


___

Online:

NASA:http://www.nasa.gov/

Ohio State University: http://glennschool.osu.edu/
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Reported by MARCIA DUNN of the Associated Press from CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.

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Life will find a way

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February 9, 2012

If scientists find microbes in a frigid lake two miles beneath the thick ice of Antarctica, it will illustrate once again that somehow life finds a way to survive in the strangest and harshest places.

Tourists walk in Valle de la Luna (Moon Valley) located inside the nature reserve of Los Flamencos in the Atacama Desert, near San Pedro de Atacama in northern Chile, April 27, 2005. NASA says the desert is much like the climate and conditions of Mars, and therefore worthy of study.

And it will offer hope that life exists beyond Earth.

Russian researchers reported Wednesday that they had reached Lake Vostok, a pristine body of water untouched by light or wind for about 20 million years. They want to know what type of microbial life—bacteria too small to see—might exist there.

Finding microbes may not sound like much. But they were the first form of Earth life eons before plants and animals existed.

If scientists find these tiny germs in Lake Vostok, it bolsters already strong hope that elsewhere in our solar system, life also might exist where once it didn’t seem possible.

There are plenty of examples of life forms existing in the most improbable of places:

  • A tiny shrimp was captured on a NASA video floating under thick ice sheets in a different part of Antarctica.
  • Tubeworms somehow get needed energy from violent hydrothermal vents in the deepest Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
  • A germ called “the world’s toughest bacterium” by the Guinness Book of World Records and also termed “Conan the Bacterium” was found 55 years ago in a can of meat. It survives and even repairs itself in radiation that would be deadly to cockroaches.
  • In the highly acidic Rio Tinto in Spain, where you dare not stick a hand, life thrives.
  • In Chile’s Atacama desert, so dry that scientists use it as an analog for Mars, life has been found blowing in the arid wind.
  • A microbe was found in a South African gold mine that essentially lives on radioactivity in the mine.

“Everything I’ve learned shows just how

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Earth blasted by solar storm

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February 1, 2012

Airplanes avoided the Earth’s poles. Swedes reveled in brilliant vistas of green and red that danced across the northern skies. Residents in Colorado Springs, Colo., mostly went about their normal lives, except for members of the U.S. Air Force, who watched for trouble in orbit.

It was a fiery explosion 93 million miles Earth caused all of this worry and forecasters warn that it might be a mild taste of things to come.

NASA recorded this image of the fiery explosion that blasted off the surface of the sun and shot toward the Earth.

What happened? The sun, which has weather-like patterns where it is exceptionally active, awakened from its slumber last week, signaling the start of yet another radiation-hurling, satellite-rattling period of solar storms known as the “solar maximum.”

Though the initial interstellar punch of the most recent storm was mild, astronomers and military officials warn the worst could be on the way.

“Everybody kind of has to be on their toes,” said Bryan DeBates, director of education for the Space Foundation in Colorado Springs.

Astronomers expect the current solar activity to peak in 2013, during a particularly active stretch of the sun’s 11-year cycle.

When that happens weather satellites, airplane communications, energy grids and the global positioning devices could be affected.

But trying to understand storms on the sun, and the damage they’ll cause, isn’t easy.

“We have a hard time predicting the weather in Colorado the way it is,” DeBates said. “Trying to predict this kind of thing on the sun is even more difficult.”

How it started: The latest storm began Jan. 22 on the sun’s northern hemisphere, where a massive explosion hurled a part of the sun’s corona into space.

Scientists on Earth detected the blast eight minutes later, when the first electrons — atomic particles — hit the earth. Within minutes after that, a wave of protons began bombarding the planet.

Those protons can damage satellite software and solar panels, said Terry Onsager, a physicist with the Space Weather Prediction Center, a branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The electrons and protons were the most powerful part of the storm, Onsager said. The storm registered as “a three,” making it the strongest storm since October 2003.

Ion blast: But the most damaging part of the storm — the geomagnetic waves — appeared to pass above the Earth and flew into open space.

Those waves of ionized solar wind usually arrive a few days after the initial explosion, often wreaking havoc with the earth’s magnetic fields and ionosphere.

Satellites can be damaged or disoriented when the ionosphere’s temperature and density changes, said Geoff McHarg, director of the Space Physics and Atmospheric Research Center at the Air Force Academy.

Those charged ions also can cause outages across electrical grids as they ripple across the Earth. It occasionally causes “bubbles” in the ionosphere that disrupt GPS signals — similar to how bubbles distort the view into a hot tub.

None of those problems were reported this past week, so now we just wait to see what happens when the next solar storm blasts in our direction..

Reported by Jakob Rodgers of the Gazette from COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.(MCT)

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

 Visit The Gazette at www.gazette.com

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